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Emacs version 24.3 is now released to the public. This release, unlike 24.2, is chock full of goodies. I’ve taken the liberty of annotating things that’re relevant to me — and hopefully you, too, dear reader — but I’ve limited my commentary to things I’m familiar with. Always keen to hear what you think about the changes in the comments.

This past week has a been a particularly busy one for Ubuntu Founder Mark Shuttleworth as he rolled out new tech and strongly respondents to critics of his Linux distribution's direction.

Microsoft has released 22 code samples for the Kinect that expose the computer code that helps it track faces, interpret gestures and determine colours, among other things. The code has been put on the CodePlex website so developers can freely download and share the software.

In 2006, Luis Falcón founded GNU Health, a free health information system that recently recieved the "Best Project of Social Benefit" award given by the Free Software Foundation. GNU Solidario is the non-profit NGO behind GNU Health, started as a free software project for Primary Care facilities in rural areas and developing countries. Since then, it has evolved into a full Hospital and Health Information System used by the United Nations, public hospitals and Ministries of Health (such as in Entre Rios, Argentina), and private institutions around the globe.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are the writer’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Linux User & Developer magazine or Imagine Publishing Ltd. As the developer of an independent Linux file and desktop manager, one gains a multifaceted perspective on everything from GUI issues and the general user experience, continuing through UI toolkit APIs and theming, down to low-level kernel APIs for device and file system support, and their incumbent issues. Yet I find I’m not the only one walking these moodily lit, disparate corridors. In tracking down assorted breakages and malfunctions in my own software, I have been surprised to repeatedly encounter the same developer footprints spread across many of these areas. It turns out that these developers, and developer teams, have often been directly responsible not only for the breakage I’m investigating, but for issues affecting a large swathe of Linux users and developers.

Ube announced today that its WiFi Smart Dimmer switch, currently an in-process project at Kickstarter, will be able to control other smart devices throughout the home via gestures on the dimmer’s capacitive multi-touch interface. According to Ube, the WiFi Smart Dimmer fits in ordinary wall switch locations, and will be able to control incandescent, LED, [...]

Brian Paul has published an initial OSMesa state tracker along with OSMesa support for the LLVMpipe and Softpipe drivers...

Opens another front in cloud language price war Amazon has plugged Node.js into its free platform-as-a-service, Elastic Beanstalk.…

So I think out of all of the feedback we got about the Anaconda UI redesign, the one piece of the UI that’s received the most negative feedback is the RAID configuration piece of the custom partitioning UI. The designs for how this UI ended up getting implemented in Fedora 18 was posted to this blog in December 2011. I really wish we’d received the level of feedback we received post F18-Beta and post F18-GA at that point, so the design could have been modified before it was implemented! That being said – I’m not placing blame with anybody but myself – I got this design wrong, and for that I am sincerely sorry.

Two and a half years ago, I bought myself a dandy little netbook, and then loaded it with Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx netbook edition, which it ran until about a week ago. With three years of long term support closing to an end, I had to decide which Linux distribution I would use for this machine, given its limited power and somewhat advanced age.

And so I decided - something simple and lightweight. And while I was tempted to try Ubuntu with Unity, Kubuntu Plasma and Cinnamon, I decided to forgo all the performance games and go for a proven solution. So I settled for Xubuntu 12.04, the latest LTS, which has impressed me a lot. And even though Xubuntu Quetzal is even better, it has a shorter life span, too short for my needs. So let's see what gives.

Mark Shuttleworth recently downplayed the likelihood that Ubuntu would turn into a true rolling-release distribution, but that changes were likely abound. He's now written another blog post about considerations being made at the company for future Ubuntu Linux releases...

It’s been two weeks since Rick Spencer made the case for a rolling release approach in Ubuntu. Having a rolling release is one of the very top suggestions from the hardcore Ubuntu user community, and after years of it being mooted by all and sundry I thought it deserved the deep consideration that Rick and his team, who represent most of Canonical’s direct contributions to Ubuntu, brought to the analysis.

It’s obviously not helpful to have mass hysteria break out when ideas like this get floated, so I would like to thank everyone who calmly provided feedback on the proposal, and blow a fat raspberry at those of you who felt obliged to mount soapboxes and opine on The End Of the World As We Know It. Sensible people the world over will appreciate the dilemma at being asked to take user feedback seriously, and being accused of unilateralism when exploring options.

Change is warranted. If we want to deliver on our mission, we have to be willing to stare controversy in the face and do the right thing anyway, recognising that we won’t know if it’s the right thing until much later, and for most of the intervening time, friends and enemies alike will go various degrees of apoplectic. Our best defense against getting it wrong is to have a strong meritocracy, which I think we do. That means letting people like Rick, who have earned their leadership roles, explore controversial territory.

So, where do we stand? And where do I stand? What’s the next step?

Mark Shuttleworth has irritated some open-source developers by his latest claim: Ubuntu's Unity existed before the GNOME Shell...

Here's some of the first OpenGL benchmarks of the ultra high-end $999 (USD) NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN running on Linux...

Nobody wants to give the man (the enterprise), the right to see what's on their phone and wipe it at will if they feel it's been compromised. One way to allevate that is to containerize or partition the corporate data so if the relationship ends or the phone gets lost or stolen, IT simply shuts off access to enterprise data. Your vacation pictures and other personal data remain intact.

Benchmarks up this afternoon are of a Western Digital RE4 WD1003FBYX, an internal enterprise hard drive, being tested from Ubuntu 13.04 with the Linux 3.8 kernel. This Linux disk drive comparison was done with an EXT4 file-system and other disk benchmarks are available from different solid-state and traditional rotating hard drives.

So Canonical is chaining its desktop Ubuntu Linux distribution to a phone/tablet/TV future, and they want us, the community, to write apps for their in-the-works devices and not care so much about the core operating system itself. That’s OK. If you really care about free (as in freedom) desktop computing, upstream is where you should be. Not an upstream just for Ubuntu Phone/Tablet, but an upstream for every(damn)body.

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of CentOS 6.4 install media for i386 and x86_64 architectures. CentOS 6.4 is based on the upstream release EL 6.4 and includes packages from all variants. All upstream repositories have been combined into one, to make it easier for end users to work with. There are many fundamental changes in this release, compared with the past CentOS 6 releases, and we highly recommend that everyone study the release notes as well as the upstream technical notes about the changes and how they might impact your installation. Everyone who has centos-cr repositories enabled and in use would already be running CentOS 6.4 as of two weeks ago.

McAfee has released new security software for Android-based embedded devices. Application Control for Android is claimed to be the only kernel-level security solution for protecting devices running embedded Android from installing or executing malicious apps.

The aim of the Hackathon is to give developers the opportunity to meet face-to-face to discuss development, coordinate, write code and collaborate with other developers.